Topic
Structural level
About: Structural level is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 12 publications have been published within this topic receiving 95 citations. The topic is also known as: strata.
Papers
TL;DR: A theory of structural levels in Karnatak music, the classical music of South India, is proposed, contending that widely accepted structural level-based accounts of improvisational practice also extend to theoretical systems, raga structure, and compositional practice.
Abstract: I. Introduction[1] In the present study, I propose a theory of structural levels in Karnatak music, the classical music of South India. In the characteristic patterns of melodic ornamentation and phrase construction that contribute to the identity of a raga, as well as in formal approaches to composition and improvisation, Karnatak musical practice involves sophisticated elaborations of simple voice-leading strands that themselves elaborate a normative background structure. This conceptual framework has significant precedent both in Indian musical scholarship and in anecdotal accounts by practitioners; with the support of close analysis of well-known compositions and performers, my theory synthesizes and expands these strands of thought, contending that widely accepted structural level-based accounts of improvisational practice also extend to theoretical systems, raga structure, and compositional practice.[2] For readers new to Karnatak music, click here to read a brief introduction to the history, instruments, and essentials of South Indian music. I follow this section with a concise summary of my theory of structural levels in Karnatak music, accompanied by a critical discussion of the article's methodology and attendant theoretical backdrop. The remainder of the article is dedicated to supporting analysis, working successively from details of the musical surface to the basic tonal structure undergirding compositional and improvisational practice.II. Structural Levels in Karnatak Music; Cultural and Methodological Concerns[3] In this article, I use the term "structural levels" more or less consistently with its application in twentieth-century Western music theory: the notion that we can conceptualize a given piece of music as a complex of hierarchically-related strata, in which foreground levels can be parsed as elaborations (or "implications") of deeper, background levels (Berry 1980, 20). For the purposes of this study, I focus exclusively on structural levels as they manifest within the domain of pitch. Of course, the very idea of pitch undergoing operations through a musical form requires the transpiration of time to make sense; I only mean to say that I will leave considerations of structural levels as they apply to tala to later studies.(1)Example 1. Structural levels in Karnatak musicExample 2. The "basic structure"Example 3. Common variants of the basic structure[4] I propose that the pitch language of Karnatak music divides into four interrelated but distinct structural levels, which I refer to using the familiar terms "foreground," "middleground," and "background" (Example 1). Occupying the musical foreground--the immediate aural experience of the listener--is gamaka, the characteristic ornamentation attendant with every raga. In the middleground we find the svara, or scale degree.(2) At a more distant middleground layer, these svaras are grouped into prayogas, characteristic phrases particular to a given raga. Finally, in the background, these prayogas outline a simple voice-leading structure spanning a composition or improvisation, which I refer to throughout this article as the "basic structure."[5] The basic structure, shown in Example 2, consists of: (a) prolongation of madhya sa, the lowest tonic note within standard vocal range; (b) an upward ascent (often through pa, the fifth) to a prolongation of tara sa, the upper tonic an octave higher; (c) descent to madhya sa. The basic structure can be thought of as an elaborative expansion of sa, and as I will demonstrate in my examples below, it is recursive within various sub-sections of a composition, as well as between structural levels. It moreover shares notable homologies with different elements of Karnatak theory and practice: the --tones of the continuous drone, as well as the standard ascent-descent (arohana-avarohana) representation of raga scales in scholarly treatises. …
16 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the state-of-the-art of structural engineering over the last 50 years is examined in three areas: (1) the spatial idealization of structural elements in the form of kinematical assumptions; (2) the constitutive idealisation of materials in terms of generalized stresses and generalized strains relations; and (3) the computational implications of solution strategy in form of closed form, approximate, and numerical procedures on the structural level.
Abstract: The state-of-the-art of progress of structural engineering over the last 50 years is examined in three areas: (1) The spatial idealization of structural elements in the form of kinematical assumptions; (2) The constitutive idealization of materials in the form of generalized stresses and generalized strains relations; and (3) The computational implications of solution strategy in the form of closed form, approximate, and numerical procedures on the structural level.
14 citations
1 Jan 2015
TL;DR: One of the attributes distinguishing music from random sound sources is the hierarchical structure in which music is organized.
Abstract: One of the attributes distinguishing music from random sound sources is the hierarchical structure in which music is organized. At the lowest level, one has events such as individual notes, which are characterized by the way they sound, their timbre, pitch, and duration. Combining various sound events, one obtains larger structures such as motifs, phrases, and sections, and these structures again form larger constructs that determine the overall layout of the composition. This higher structural level is also referred to as the musical structure of the piece, which is specified in terms of musical parts and their mutual relations. For example, in popular music such parts can be the intro, the chorus, and the verse sections of the song. Or in classical music, they can be the exposition, the development, and the recapitulation of a movement.
14 citations
TL;DR: For instance, this article found a low-frequency neural component that modulated the neural rhythms of beat tracking and reliably parsed musical phrases, suggesting that listeners established structural predictions from ongoing listening experience to track phrasal boundaries.
Abstract: Summary Music, like language, is characterized by hierarchically organized structure that unfolds over time. Music listening therefore requires not only the tracking of notes and beats but also internally constructing high-level musical structures or phrases and anticipating incoming contents. Unlike for language, mechanistic evidence for online musical segmentation and prediction at a structural level is sparse. We recorded neurophysiological data from participants listening to music in its original forms as well as in manipulated versions with locally or globally reversed harmonic structures. We discovered a low-frequency neural component that modulated the neural rhythms of beat tracking and reliably parsed musical phrases. We next identified phrasal phase precession, suggesting that listeners established structural predictions from ongoing listening experience to track phrasal boundaries. The data point to brain mechanisms that listeners use to segment continuous music at the phrasal level and to predict abstract structural features of music.
8 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a generalized stiffness damage model was developed for each structural level based on the presented deformation equivalent principle, and an impact factor was proposed to reflect the damage correlations between different structural levels.
Abstract: Five structural levels, that is, material level, section level, member level, storey level, and structure level, were proposed to analyze the multilevel nonlinear mechanism of the reinforced concrete (RC) framed structures. Based on the presented deformation equivalent principle, a generalized stiffness damage model was developed for each structural level. At each structural level, the stiffness damage value can be calculated by the integration of the material stiffness damage. Furthermore, an impact factor was proposed to reflect the damage correlations between different structural levels. In order to verify this method, the proposed method was used to study the damage evolutions at various structural levels of a 12-storey frame structure. The numerical model utilizing the proposed analysis method produces results in good agreement with the test results of the 12-storey frame structure. It shows that the proposed method is useful to assess the structure multilevel damage performance and to design a new structure.
4 citations
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Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 1 |
| 2018 | 1 |
| 2017 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2 |
| 2012 | 1 |
| 2011 | 1 |